Some smart agenda setting by the Canadian Medical Association today with the release of their poll linking the recession to health woes. They have been the main story for most major news outlets. On the substance of the survey it is kind of a case of, if I may use this expression, “no shit Sherlock.” Still it seems to many today as if the atom has been split for the first time.
Where to go from here? Well, putting people back to work would be a good first step and that will happen but never as fast as we would all like. Thankfully, the government has invested more into mental-health treatment strategies that I hope are providing help where applicable now. Coming into the fall when recession recovery planning should take more of the center stage, a vigorous debate leading to a wellness plan beyond just the usual conflict about the state of our state-run system is vital. Watching the debate in the United States over the President’s health-care reforms, it often seems we focus on the wrong elements for discussion. We look at health-care management systems, which yes are important, and their structural functions as either the panacea or the plight, but we rarely devote the time or resources we need to preventive individual or collective health improvement approaches. To put it in less genteel economic terms, spending money on the front end to get a return on the back end.
If we as Canadians have learned anything from the global economic strife it is that smart prudent front-end work can pay-off: witness the regulation of Canada’s banking system. We would be in a much worse place if time, energy and resources had not been invested by assorted governments to inoculate us against world financial pandemics. We now need some of that wisdom directed at our social capital.
